Displacement Activity

Displacement activity, definition: an unnecessary activity carried out to avoid a difficult or unpleasant scenario.

Examples: A bird, faced with an ambiguous situation – should he fly away or hang around for some potentially nutritious crumbs? – will peck the ground. A dog, unsure whether or not he’s in trouble, will scratch himself. A writer, who knows she has fans waiting for another book but also has growing fears that no-one wants to publish her, makes an apple pie.

I’m a recent convert to sour cream pastry and will say that it made a superb pie crust but I must also confess that this household didn’t need an apple pie. Neither has it needed two bottles of plum vodka, a tapestry cushion cover and a dozen origami harvest mice, but there it is. That’s what you get when you have an anxious novelist displacing away like there’s no tomorrow.